Indians want jobs security not cash handouts; LSE study shows

Unemployed residents of urban India want the government to guarantee them jobs and not just give out cash handouts as per a study done by LSE.

82% of respondents in LSE's survey for it's report said they preferred to have job security similar to the kind provided in rural India schemes. Only 16% of those asked said they would opt for a cash handout. Even most of those who had received cash handouts from the government in the wake of the pandemic preferred having job protection over financial assistance, wrote Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli, the authors of the report titled  ‘City of dreams no more, a year on: worklessness and active labour market policies in urban India’

Here are some of the other findings of that report-: 

Some other findings of the survey are:

• Urban individuals have been unemployed for the last six months on average
• The share of employed individuals who had a full year’s work has halved since the previous year and they have seen an average reduction of six working hours per week
• Government programmes such as state insurance are barely reaching low-income urban areas
• Less than 1% of the respondents had access to these government benefits

India's unemployment level has been swaying between 9%-11% due to localised lockdowns and economists have been raising concern on the falling labour participation rate indicating despondency amongst job seekers.